Perseverance keeps the region’s food scene cooking
I started writing restaurant reviews in the Waterloo Region Record in 2004, when the dining scene was dramatically different than it is today: there was a clunky internet and no social media.
After a couple hundred reviews followed by nearly two decades of writing about food, it is difficult to select only a few highlights that distinguished the culinary landscape.
But as I depart Waterloo Region for the Ottawa area and semi-retirement, I’ve jotted down just a handful of impressions of the food and beverage industry that I take with me — and leave with you.
So-called “chef-driven” restaurants have been around for a long time, but over the past many years, their presence here has been amplified; that has been a positive evolution in the way we ate and dined over those two decades. A chef’s — and chef-owner’s — personality came to the fore.
For instance, Janet Lynn Leslie and Kevin Wong — both sadly gone from us too soon — brought us such a dining foundation in Janet Lynn’s Bistro in 1985. The restaurant continues to cook in Belmont Village.
The same could be said of Peter Martin’s trend-setting 20 King in downtown Kitchener, where I worked for a short time.
As the 2000s progressed, the number of independent restaurants, owned and operated by a chef-restaurateur, grew despite the always-strong presence of chain food brands possessed of rich advertising budgets.
There was a moment when diners in Waterloo Region wanted “local” ingredients and cooking, and they embraced these smaller and unique venues — especially after Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s “The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating” was published in 2007.
While the book was more a chronicle of the pair’s quest for local foods for their own apartment kitchen than searching for it at local restaurants, a chord was struck: the concept became hugely popular and gave cooks more reason to prepare and serve a local menu.
I wrote a review of Nick and Nat’s Uptown 21 Food and Drink, the Benninger’s iconic uptown Waterloo restaurant that clearly had a significant impact on local dining.
Having worked their way through La Costa in downtown Kitchener (as teenagers) and Hannah’s Bella Bistro in Waterloo, the pair set up something of a model for sourcing and cooking local products and ingredients from the region — and often less than 50 kilometres, given the area farms they drew from.
I don’t recall most of the details of the Uptown 21 review, but I do remember a scrumptious dessert, a “float” made with chocolate ice cream and a stout-like beer from Brick Brewing, located a couple of blocks away on King Street. It was served with lovely beignets, the latter certainly a Nick Benninger favourite.
Another favourite was his very porky and very hefty and delicious version of choucroute garnie (sauerkraut and sausages) — an interpretation of the classic Alsatian dish through the lens of Edna Staebler and “Waterloo County fare.”
At the pinnacle of fine dining, Relais & Châteaux Langdon Hall Country House Hotel and Spa has put the region on the map as one of only a handful of restaurants awarded a Top 10 spot on Canada's 100 Best list year after year. Executive chef Jason Bangerter has headed up the kitchen for 10 years — and his name has been firmly tied to the restaurant’s success.
There have always been bakeries in the region — and really good ones too. But I recall the amazing breads and pastries that came out of Kitchener’s Golden Hearth around the same time as “The 100Mile Diet” book: Aura Hertzog and Tim Simpson turned out fine breads and pastries and were expert chocolatiers. (Tavis Weber continues the delicious traditions in the same location today.)
Hertzog then branched out on her own with Ambrosia Pastry Co., rebranding it as it is now in the Central Frederick neighbourhood: AURA-LA Pastries + Provisions. The front of the building retains the “FV” tiles that signified “Fischer’s Variety,” an earlier neighbourhood corner store where my kids biked to get ice cream treats.
Using premium ingredients and excellent technique, Hertzog’s kouign-amann, a laminated pastry, is simply stellar and unique in this area: a sweeter and more caramelized sort of Viennoiserie than a croissant, the pastry unfurls into wondrously delectable shards that accompany a good cup of coffee in an unparalleled way.
Hertzog, along with Lori Maidlow and the Culinary Studio team of Jody O’Malley and Kirstie Herbstreit, made up at least a few of a group of female food entrepreneurs that has since grown in professional restaurant kitchens, bakeries and food processing companies: that includes Lenore Johnson, Ce Johnston, Ajoa Mintah, Rochelle Williams, Beckie Prime, Hayley Turnbull and farmer Aliyah Fraser.
In an industry still struggling with pandemic fallout, it is encouraging to see these businesses thriving.
For me, one of the most exciting and energizing aspects of Waterloo Region’s restaurant growth has been the range of foods that you can now find, and the way they have been embraced.
While icons like the Ben Thanh and Tien Hoa Inn and other Chinese restaurants were among the first on the scene, a few Vietnamese and Thai restaurants soon appeared to change — in a delicious way — the food landscape.
At one point not so long ago, and because there were six of them within a few blocks in downtown Kitchener, I called the city the pupusa capital of southwestern Ontario.
The Salvadoran “pancake” is virtually the country’s national dish, and there remain several venues making the cornflour snack today. Pupuseria Latinos on Eby Street is, for example, very busy during Saturday morning Kitchener Market hours.
Otherwise, from Waterloo to Kitchener to Cambridge, you can find Korean and Japanese restaurants in both take-away and dine-in format.
Cooks and restaurants preparing Nigerian food have recently appeared, and several Caribbean kitchens make roti and Jamaican pizza, while a half-dozen Ethiopian and Eritrean venues serve dishes built around another flatbread, the unique injera that also serves as one’s utensil for scooping up the various stewed lentils and legumes of the cuisine.
I have loved those dishes from the first time I tried them at least a decade ago.
Shawarma restaurants with Iraqi, Lebanese and Syrian flavours now seem on the verge of eclipsing pizza joints in their numbers, and one Waterloo favourite, Shawerma Plus, has become quite active in franchising its brand throughout Ontario.
Waterloo Region, I could even say, has become well-known for its bottled hot sauces, and several of those are inspired by the flavours and chili-pepper Scoville-heat of the Caribbean.
Last year, there was even a hot sauce festival in Kitchener.
In a case of “the presence of absence,” highlighting these individuals, brands and foods only serves to indicate the many others I haven’t mentioned due to space: this final column could easily be three or four parts.
But as a final reflection, I will say that no matter the era, the industry always seems to be of gossamer fragility threatened to be blown away by economics, technological change, cataclysmic events and the whimsical preferences of fickle customers.
Yet a good portion of it always manages to persevere.
There’s something inherently resilient about restaurants and food operations and the people who labour in them, not despite change but because of it.
The culinary institution — fast food or fine dining — may falter at times, but it emerges and reemerges and adjusts and readjusts to the new conditions and with a renewed and delicious vigour.
That’s one reason I stuck around for so long.